R: the final software for statistical and graphical analysis

R: the final software for statistical and graphical analysis

Today I will introduce one of the tools that I use in my research (and part of my teaching): R. For those who do not know it, R is a language and programming environment for statistical and graphical analysis. It was originally developed by Robert Gentleman and Ross Ihaka (the name of this language and environment comes from the initials of their names) in 1993. Today, its development is responsibility of the R Development Core Team, and is used by a large number of researchers and teachers worldwide. R is distributed through a GNU license, so you can download and use for free.

To talk about R, firstly we should talk about S. S is also a language and programming environment developed at Bell Laboratories by John Chambers and his colleagues in 1971. The modern implementations of S are R, as a GNU project, and S- PLUS, as a licensed software.
Mainly R gives us the following stuff:

A wide range of statistical tools, which increases every day through packages that researchers worldwide are developing.

A wide range of graphical tools, which also increases daily.

A programming environment for any type of project. For example, there are some R packages which allow us to create Latex documents or packages that allow us to create interactive web interfaces.

As you can see, R is a language and environment very flexible that allows us to do almost anything. In addition, we can add new features and functions through packets, so the possibilities are almost endless. In the next post, I will start working with R so you can see how it works and what opportunities you have.

Finally, remember that R works in any of the following operating systems: UNIX, Linux, Windows and MacOS.